A Brief Look Into ZETA's Future.

Details

As is the norm (for the most cases) with private software companies, yellowTAB before, and now Magnussoft, have been reserved in commenting what's coming down the road. We know Multi-User is coming (as we here at ICO have shown you) and also that GCC4 is part of ZETA's future, but today we're going to bring you a small glimpse in what's coming for ZETA and its users.

So click below and enjoy.

Ed. Note: I think, by reading some comments below, that I wasn't clear enough when writing this piece. What we've shown you isn't what Magnussoft is working at the moment, it's what might happen in the future. Those plans and designs were made at yellowTAB and they (that's the plan so far) will be implemented in the future, but it's not what they're working on presently. Now back to our regular programming.

Since, like we mentioned, it's only a brief look, we'll only be focusing on 2 aspects: Preferences and Updater.

Preferences

ZETA has seen a large transformation in its Preferences. Many welcomed the changes while others still prefer BeOS' way. With ZETA 2.0 the route will continue with the centralized Preferences app, with changes coming both to the look (improved Tabs and their navigation) and functionality. In this case, you'll see in the screenshot below that some categories have been combined "based on user feedback".

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Another addition is the "Related Options" (aka similar links) you see in the bottom of the window and at the righthand top corner, the "Search" field. By this time, the search index will be implemented allowing users to easily find their way around ZETA's Preferences.

Updater
 
This is something that has been talked about for a long time but not yet implemented. That will change (at least it's planned) with ZETA 2.0. Let's start its integration with the above topic, the Preferences. As you can see below, the user will be presented with the standard options: the time period for the OS to check for updates, the option which says the OS to automatically download available updates, and the option to automatically install the downloaded updates. Notice once again the "Related Options" on the bottom half.
 
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Now you can see the Updater in action. Available for download are 3 updates: driver upgrade, OS update and backgrounds. Each update has available an "info" link, to provide the user with more information about it. The user can also see the date of the update, the size and its level, which in this case go from Critical to Optional.
 
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In case there aren't any updates available, the Updater will show the following.
 
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We'll now show you the complete update process, in this case, with updates available for download.
 
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At this time, as you can see above, the user can choose to either close the Updater or reboot the system. If there were updates that the user downloaded but didn't choose to install at the time, this window will appear.
 
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Finally, if the Updater can't connect to the server to check for updates, it'll of course complain.
 
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So there you have it, I hope you've enjoyed this brief glimpse into ZETA's future, according to current plans, since we here at ICO can't say for sure if things will be as we've shown here of course.

I'd like to thank Lisa for taking the time to send me the original shots and PDFs.